Brenly remembers 9/11, Hamilton out, Astros ratings update

Bob Brenly, right, was a key figure in one of the most memorable World Series in history. (Rob Schumacher/Associated Press)

Excuse the slightly belated nature of this note. It got cut for space from the Astros report in the Wednesday newspaper.

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Bob Brenly will always be associated with baseball on Sept. 11 and baseball in 2001 as manager of the Diamondbacks team that beat the Yankees in one of the sport’s most memorable World Series.

Brenly was at Minute Maid Park on this 9/11 in his role as the Cubs’ television analyst on WGN, and he said he still struggles with the inevitable questions that accompany the day and the season that ended with a world championship against a team that had so many fans who lost loved ones on 9/11.

“The games for me were incredibly exciting and competitive and fun at the same time,” he said. “But it always felt like you couldn’t really enjoy it the way you should, just out of respect.”

The night before Game 7, Brenly said he went home, ate reheated pizza with his wife and, after being unable to sleep, sat by his pool and thought about the day to come.

“The next thing I remember, I hear the newspaper hitting the driveway and it’s 5:30 a.m.,” he said. “I had been out there for hours, but my mind was somewhere else, I went to the ballpark at 10 in the morning, and the rest of the day was just a blur.

“It wasn’t that we didn’t enjoy it, but you had to be respectful. Anybody who went out there and whooped and hollered and pulled out their shirttails and dumped Gatorade buckets at that particular moment didn’t have a good grasp on reality, but we had a veteran team. Sometime you have to live a little longer to appreciate how special baseball is and how insignificant it is at the same time.”

Brenly still treasures the championship, of course, and he cherishes the memory of what baseball meant to Americans in that uncertain time.

“I’ve never been prouder to be part of professional baseball,” he said. “We all needed something to take our minds off things, even if it was for a couple of hours a day. To provide that service, as insignificant as it seemed at the time, was very important in our country’s healing.”

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Also on hand with the Cubs this trip was the radio team of Pat Hughes and Keith Moreland. Moreland, of course, is the former football and baseball analyst for the Texas Longhorns radio network, now in his second year as Ron Santo’s successor in that chair. And, no, he can’t get the Longhorn Network at his house, either.

Hughes, as we have discussed before, has a company called Baseball Voices that distributes his CD tributes to notable baseball announcers, including the likes of Vin Scully, Jack Buck, Milo Hamilton and Red Barber. The Santo CD is his latest project available for sale, and he’s working on tributes to Russ Hodges and Lon Simmons.

Speaking of Hamilton, he’s been away from the ballpark this week with an undisclosed illness. No word when he will return to wrap up his final full season in the booth.

And, speaking of the Astros, after their record low 0.05 Nielsen rating for Sunday’s game, they rebounded to a relatively robust 0.5 on Monday (CORRECTION FOLLOWS) and climbed to 0.7 for their win Tuesday over the Cubs. (END CORRECTION) For the season, the Astros are averaging slightly better than a 1.0 rating for games on FS Houston.